The invention relates to an apparatus for individual separation of disk-shaped items.
Such an apparatus as a rule has the objective of individually separating the disk-shaped items, in particular items of different sizes and which are delivered as a mass, in such a way that they can be sorted, counted, and/or also stacked and packed in a following apparatus. Apart from coins, these items may, for example, also be washers or other disk-shaped parts which can be produced by automatic machines. Although such items are round as a rule, polygonal disk-shaped items are also covered by this concept, such as for example octagonal coins.
In the case of an apparatus known from DE-Al 29 02 648 incorporated herein, the coins fed on a rotary plate are drawn off the rotary plate by a conveyor belt acting from above at an outwardly directed angle with respect to a tangent from a discharge channel arranged on the circumferential track and which is limited in height. The height limitation of the discharge channel and the conveyor belt pushing the coins on a fixed underlying surface contribute to individual separation. The height limitation is adapted to the thickest coin to be considered. The passage width of the outlet opening must be smaller than twice the diameter of the smallest coin to be handled in order that two coins cannot pass through next to each other. For adaptation to the coin size of various currencies, the width must be variable.
If it is necessary in this case also to individually separate coins of which two of the thinnest, one on top of the other, are not thicker than the thickest coin, an individual separation by the height limitation is not possible. If such coins then also lie congruently one on top of the other, the conveyor belt, acting in fact only on the upper coin, also cannot ensure individual separation since the fixed underlying surface, which as a rule is a laterally limited channel, generally has good sliding properties to achieve a high output. This is also true due to the constant rubbing effects. Thus, such a coin pair passes through the individual separation apparatus without separation.
A further possibility for malfunctions is that coins jam or become wedged at constricted points, such as for example at the outlet opening between the discharge channel and the point of application of the conveyor belt. To remedy such malfunctions, known individual separating apparatuses have manually releasable operating elements. Although such malfunctions can be rectified in this way, the operation in progress is temporarily interrupted and the cost-effectiveness of the individual separating apparatus is impaired.
Another individual separating apparatus, known from DE-Al 27 54 792, has, for a height limitation, a roll positioned ahead of the outlet opening and rotatingly driven in such a way that the upper coins of those coins lying one on top of the other are intended to be repelled in the direction of the center of the plate. However, since the roll has to allow the thickest coin arriving for individual separation to pass, its distance from the rotary plate must be just as large as the already mentioned fixed height limitation. Thus, it is also possible in this case for two thin coins, lying one on top of the other, to pass through the gap underneath this roll.